


Some Things Are Worth Less

by TheFoxInWhite



Category: Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Red Hood/Arsenal (Comics)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Loss of Limbs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 13:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12748845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFoxInWhite/pseuds/TheFoxInWhite
Summary: A short drabble I sent to a friend over skype, and I liked it enough to rewrite and post. Can be read as gen or shippyWhen it comes to his best friend, there's little Roy won't give up to save Jason





	Some Things Are Worth Less

There's fire and rock and metal and his arm is throbbing, it's bleeding, seeping down in to his glove when it's pinned beneath the chunk of wall. Roy grits his teeth and tries to shift away from it, wriggling fruitlessly until he feels it grind down in to bone. Pain spears through him, so powerful it twists his stomach and turns his head in a dizzy spin.

 

Steadily, thick, black smoke fills the room, the growing fire sending flickering red orange light across Jason's slack face. He'd lost the helmet sometime before the explosion, Roy can't remember why now, doesn't care why, only wishes that he'd still had it. With it, with it's protection and absorption, Jason might still be conscious after the chunk of right struck him. He'd know about the slowly creeping gasoline, and the fire licking away at the room. But he's bleeding heavily from the temple, his skin ashen.

 

“Jason!” Roy's voice cracks. Jason doesn't even twitch.

 

The gasoline crawls closer along the concrete, dark and acrid to the nose. The fire along the back wall consumes everything in it's path, eating it's way closer to the glugging source of the gasoline where it drips from a plastic can.

 

If the gasoline touches Jason-

 

If the fire reaches the gasoline-

 

Roy grits his teeth, shoving desperately at the masonry. “Jason!” he calls again, just short of screaming it in frustration, terror. His shifting only worsens the bleeding, leaving his arm hot and cold at once as the circulation rapidly disappears. Just beneath the stone, Roy sees the flesh tearing away, sees the red slick white expanse of his own bone and oh god it's the worst pain of his life. He though withdrawal was bad, thought the beatings he took in the Q'urac prison were awful, but this, it's so much worse. His arm is _crushed_ and even if he gets it free it might be fucking useless. It might never draw back a bow again, because Roy can barely feel his fingers and even so much as twisting them makes the shattered bones in his arm scream with pain.

 

Even if he gets free with a useless arm, it'll be too late to save Jason.

 

Roy slumps back to the floor, heart and head pounding with fear and pain, sweat painting his forehead. He cries out, slamming his free fist against the floor, and it hits something. Roy turns, and sees the elegantly carved hilt of one of Jason's strange copper swords. All Blades, he called them, the magical weapons Roy's seen shrink and grow again. Roy knows they're impossibly, unnaturally sharp; he's seen them cleave the head from the neck of an Untitled bastard like the flesh and bone was warm butter.

 

The gasoline reaches Jason, soaking in to his hair, and Roy's heart lurches.

 

He was wrong before. A crushed arm is terrible, withdrawal and beatings painful.

 

The feeling of metal cleaving through flesh and nerves and bone, severing something, disrupting and ending that _sensation_. Ripping limb from body. There's nothing, nothing in the entire fucking _world_ that can come close to comparing it. Roy grips the hilt tighter and he _screams_ until he tastes blood in the back of his throat and he's free and it's all consuming, the pain. It's fire and ice and lightning and his nerves howl in agony, seeking connections that are gone, that fizzle with screeching feedback when they come up short.

 

Roy sits up violently, retching at the pain, emptying his stomach. But he's free.

 

Blood pours in a gush from the wound, and Roy has to use teeth and his shaking left hand, still holding the red streaked All Blade to yank a scrap of fabric around it _(the stump)_. Then he's up, lurching sideways, swearing and fighting the nausea as he takes one plodding step after another towards Jason's prone form.

 

Somehow, he still holds the sword as he bends and gets Jason by the back of his jacket, dragging him from beneath the rubble. He should lift Jason, he thinks, get him on his feet and wake him up, but it's taking all of Roy's energy and focus to drag them both from the building, putting one foot in front of the other, eyes on the door as the fire roars and smoke chokes them both. Behind them, the fire hits the gasoline and it catches with a whistling nose, roaring violently.

 

 _That was almost Jason,_ Roy thinks as he shoves out the door. Outside the air is crisp and cool and clear, and Roy sucks it in with short, ragged gasps. Pain. Pain and heat and cold and dizziness.

 

Thirty feet from the building and Roy's feet will take them no more. Jason and sword fall from Roy's hand _(his only remaining hand)_ and he sways. “Jason,” he mumbles, or maybe he just thinks it, but blue eyes are fluttering open and Jason wakes with a groan.

 

Roy manages a weak, relieved grin before the world shutters to black and quiet. He's unconscious before his knees even hit the ground.

 


End file.
